Twitter is an online website for social networking and microblogging. Jack Dorsey launched Twitter in July of 2006, and by 2012 has over 500 million registered users. It allows its users to send and read text-based messages with a maximum of 140 characters, called “tweets.” With over 340 million tweets daily and over 1.6 billion search queries per day, Twitter has become the tenth most visited websites on the Internet.

By default, tweets are publicly visible; however senders can restrict the message delivery to only their followers. When subscribing to others tweets, it is known as “following,” the subscribers are known as “followers.” If a user has a follower they do not want, they do have the ability to block that user. Unregistered users can still read tweets, however, only registered users can post tweets. By computer, smartphone apps, and text messages are all ways that users can update their profile.

When putting a “@” symbol before a username you can mention or reply to another user. If you wanted to share another user’s tweet with your followers, you are able to “retweet” their message. With the use of “hashtags”, users can group posts together by topic. This is done by putting a “#” symbol before a word or phrase. If a word or phrase is tagged at a higher rate than other tag it becomes a “trending topic”. Trending topics become popular by the effort of the user or because it is an event that everyone is talking about. These topics help twitter users to understand what is going on in the world around them. The best topics are then scrolled across the twitter homepage. This however has created some controversy so twitter now censors hashtags that can be found to be offensive. Twitter launched a verification system in 2008, which allowed celebrities to verify their accounts to prove they are not fake. Now it is also used to verify businesses and public figures.